Overview

This analysis represents the responses provided by attendees at the R Forwards Package Workshop held in Chicago on February 23, 2019.

About 30 women attended the workshop, and we have survey responses from 28 for the pre-survey and 29 for the post-survey.

The Questions

We purposely designed this survey to have only questions that might be relevant to improving the teaching of workshops like this in the future, and avoided asking for too much personal information about students. Because all responses on each survey are anonymous, we cannot connect the responses in the two surveys directly.

Pre-test Items

##  [1] "Timestamp"                    "Can Find \n R Packages"      
##  [3] "Can Use \n R Projects"        "Has Github Acct"             
##  [5] "Wrote \n Unit Test"           "Regularly \n Work in R"      
##  [7] "Building \n R Functions"      "Constructing \n R Packages"  
##  [9] "Creating \n Unit Tests"       "Using Git/Github"            
## [11] "Using R \n Projects"          "Professional Level"          
## [13] "No Open \n Source Experience" "Chicago Local"

Post-test Items

##  [1] "Timestamp"                      "Can Find \n R Packages"        
##  [3] "Can Use \n R Projects"          "Has Github Acct"               
##  [5] "Wrote \n Unit Test"             "Regularly \n Work in R"        
##  [7] "Building \n R Functions"        "Constructing \n R Packages"    
##  [9] "Creating \n Unit Tests"         "Using Git/Github"              
## [11] "Using R \n Projects"            "Professional Level"            
## [13] "No Open \n Source Experience"   "Chicago Local"                 
## [15] "Location \n Convenience"        "Facilities"                    
## [17] "Food"                           "Morning \n Teaching Skill"     
## [19] "Morning Content \n Expertise"   "Afternoon \n Teaching Skill"   
## [21] "Afternoon Content \n Expertise" "Time for \n Practice"          
## [23] "Application \n Process"         "Free Text Feedback"

Pre-test Descriptive Statistics

Initial Skills

What have our students done previously in their R analyses? What is new to them?

Comfort with Topic Areas

Which of the general topics we plan to cover are they already comfortable doing?

Professional Experience Levels

We intentionally solicited students from a variety of backgrounds and skill levels - how did we do? Is our class a diverse group experientially?

Skills by Professional Level

Are there differences in starting skills based on the individual’s level of professional experience?

Post-test Comparison

After the workshop, how did people’s feelings about their confidence change?

Comfort with Topic Areas

Comfort with Topic Areas by Professional Level

Were we equally effective at helping people of all levels? We want to ensure that our teaching meets all students where they are.

Satisfaction with Program

Finally, how did students feel about the surroundings, instruction, and logistics? This is important to create a good learning environment.

Free Text Responses

x
Thank you for organizing this event! I learned a lot!
the room was very cold! But the content was excellent!!
This was great. Thank you!
Thank you so much!!
Thanks! This was helpful and I am excited to work on the package I’ve been wanting to write for a few months!
I really enjoyed today! I learned so much and the structure of the day made it really easy to learn.
Space out the afternoon session or make that a one-day workshop alone.
Really great experience, seamlessly done! Thank you for your time :)
Excellent workshop!
It felt like there was a little too much lecturing without hands-on time in the second section. Overall, this was really great!
i wish that more examples would have been provided for the application of unit testing. Rather than unit test our own package it would have been nice to test a small but robust package (like the spongebob package).
This was an excellent workshop and a great group to work with!
Thank you!!
Thank you for organizing!
Perhaps adding a before of any exercise (like the solved practice) could be a good idea.
It’s cold, the pace was so fast, and it would have been beneficial to have github as prework, or to make this a two day workshop… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
This workshop was quite valuable as this was my first exposure to creating packages. It’s a lot of information, so I’ll need to use the handouts to practice. Excellent presenters - both are extremely knowledgeable and easy to understand. I also appreciated that there were assistants in the room who could help when you get stuck. Great idea! Separate from the workshop, the facility got really cold in the pm. Food was excellent.

Conclusions

Based on the responses shown, participants in the workshop clearly gained confidence in their abilities to work with R Packages and Unit Tests, among other things.

We do know, from this data, that people would like more hands-on practice in the workshop, and there’s some level of dissatisfaction with the convenience of our location - we were on the UChicago campus which is quite far from the city center. These are lessons we will take and apply to future efforts.

Generally, this looks like a successful workshop and we are very happy with how everything went!